Leonardo DiCaprio Is Forever Looking Death Right In the Eye

Perhaps you’ve heard a story about Leonardo DiCaprio and a near-death experience? The one about the shark, maybe? Or the one about the trick parachute? Or the exploding plane? Or the one about the hypothermia! Or the one about raw meat?! Or the one about the intentionally raw meat, a.k.a. sushi? DiCaprio has flirted with death so many times, there’s almost no way to be certain that the DiCaprio before us is not a DiCapri-ghost.

Sometimes the brush with death is in service of a film, but usually it’s DiCaprio doing some extreme activity. The latest example is a sort of hybrid. Prior to filming his climate-change documentary, Before the Flood, Leo went scuba diving with the film’s director, Fisher Stevens, and Edward Norton—remember Norton; he‘s as key a player in this story as Leonardo DiCaprio’s continued presence on this earth. As Stevens tells GQ in an anecdote brought to our attention by Vulture:

The second time we properly hung out together was in 2010 when I was
invited to film Sylvia Earle for a TED conference expedition to the
Galapagos. Leo was on the expedition. I was filming Sylvia and I had
this little easy camera to shoot underwater, and he was Sylvia’s
diving buddy, so I said, would you film Sylvia? And he said, "Yeah I
love it man, I love it." I was diving buddies with Edward Norton. So
we go down and we see 300 Eagle Rays and Spotted Rays and it was an
amazing dive. Leo bolts away with Sylvia, and Edward goes in front of
me and the next thing I know after 20 minutes I’d lost them all.
Then, I see Leo buddy breathing, because Leo’s tank was leaking
oxygen, and Edward had to save him! It was pretty crazy. But he
actually did get some film for me and it was good for a second and
then it got pretty shaky when he couldn’t breathe. But we really
bonded on that trip.

This is just the latest in a long line of near-death experiences for DiCaprio. It’s actually the second underwater one that we know about. It’s roughly 1/8 as gag-inducing as eating piece after piece of whitetail fish sushi on the set of The Wolf of Wall Street, until his body was 20 percent mercury (as told by by director Martin Scorsese). Tonight, when you’re drifting off to sleep, remember to be extra thankful that DiCaprio is still around to hob nob and vape, vape and hob nob another day.

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